Isaiah Berlin Quotes

Isaiah Berlin was born in 1909 to a prosperous family in Riga where they remained until moving to Petrograd in Russia in 1915. His family were to witness both the February and the October 1917 revolutions and decided the oppression they felt in post revolution Russia was not conducive with the freedom they anticipated so they returned to Riga only to find the seeds of anti-seminism being sown where they were once welcomed. In 1921 the family moved west to London where within one year young Isaiah quickly learnt the language and started to excel at school. He continued his education at Corpus Christi College, Oxford where after scoring a number of firsts in varying philosophy degrees he took up a post as a tutor of philosophy at New College, Oxford. This started a long association with the colleges and universities of Oxford that lasted into the late twentieth century. His work on philosophy and the history of ideas brought him great acclaim with his passionate depiction of the pluralism of beliefs standing in one corner against what many deem their absolute truths, he made a convincing case that made generations of intellectuals question the incompatibilities of systems and cultures. He was a great believer in freedom from interference yet he recognised that combinations of even the greatest systems could never mean equality for all as there always will be losers no matter the good intentions. The Two Concepts of Liberty was said to be his greatest work where he compared negative freedom with positive freedom and outlined that freedom from interference is different from what a person is free to do because these two concepts of freedom could never mix in the incompatible mind of human values. Without doubt he was one of the great thinkers of the twentieth century so here is my compilation of 10 of the best Isaiah Berlin quotes.

Mini Bio

Name: Isaiah Berlin

Born: 6th June 1909, Riga, Russian Empire (present-day Latvia)

Died: 5th November 1997, Oxford, U.K.

Occupation: Historian, political theorist and philosopher

Alma Mater: Corpus Christi College, Oxford

Famous for: His writing about the history of ideas

Trivia: Former prime minister of England Winston Churchill once famously mistook him for the composer Irving Berlin

"The first people totalitarians destroy or silence are men of ideas and free minds"

Isaiah Berlin

"The trouble with academics and commentators is that they care more about whether ideas are interesting than whether they are true"

Isaiah Berlin

"The fundamental sense of freedom is freedom from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by others"

Isaiah Berlin

"Liberty is liberty, not equality or fairness or justice or human happiness or a quiet conscience"

Isaiah Berlin

"Freedom for the wolves has often meant death to the sheep"

Isaiah Berlin

"True knowledge is knowledge of why things are as they are, and not merely what they are"

Isaiah Berlin

"Out of the crooked timber of humanity, nothing completely straight was ever made"